the Fountain, all the beers on draught -with the exception of Guinness, which transcends corporate boundaries and is carried everywhere as the stout of choice-are Ind Coope brands. In a Courage pub, the beers will all be Courage brands. The advantages to the Big Six of such a scheme are obvious and enor- mous. British drinkers complain vehe- mently about it, but they are, on the whole, as lazy as the rest of us, and few of them will desert their handy local and walk an extra block or two to a pub where a preferred brand might be on tap. (In North London, Bass pubs are thought to have the best beer; Watney pubs are thought to have the worst.) Pubs that are still independent are known as free houses, and they offer a very good selection of premium beers that are unavailable in affiliated pubs. The beers come from little brew- eries outside the corporate world, and they are strong and well made, and have not been toned down to meet the bland requirements of an imaginary customer's palate. The question of beer quality, or lack of it, is often discussed in pubs, even as the subject of the inquiry is being swallowed. In all my hours at the Fountain, I never heard anybody say that British beer is better now than it was in the past. Generally speaking, beer drinkers seem to feel that since corporations own the pubs and have, as it were, a captive audience, their devotion to quality could be said to be nonexistent. The most common evidence cited in support of this argu- ment is the great keg-beer scandal of the nineteen -sixties, which occurred shortly after the corporate takeover be- gan in earnest. In pubs, the preferred draught is usually bitter ale, a copper- colored, unpasteurized, heavily hopped brew that varies in alcoholic content from three to five and a half per cent. It varies in taste, too. Most bitters are tart on the tongue, with a sour un- derbite, but a few are slightly sweet. Bitter comes to the pub in casks and undergoes a secondary fermentation in the pub cellar, supervised by an experi- enced cellarman, who monitors tem- peratures, the action of the yeast, and other important factors. He keeps the casks well ventilated by hammering a porous wooden peg into each of them. Bitter is such a delicately balanced brew that it must be tapped at exactly the right moment or its flavor will be ruined. The beer, never carbonated, rises to the bar via a manual pump system. The barman or barmaId pulls a handle, and out it flows, half a pint per stroke. It takes time, care, energy, and a great deal of craft to make traditional cask-condi tioned ales, so, not surpris- ingly, the corporations decided to phase them out and replace them with more cost-efficient products-pristine keg bitters that would be filtered and pasteurized (longer shelf life), carbon- ated (less fragile and easier to tap), and brewed to be served cold (masks the flavor). Keg bitters would also have the advantage of requiring mini- mal care. An inept cellarman could knock a keg over, roll it around, thump it like a conga drum, and still not destroy the beer. Moreover, keg bitters, being uniform and widely dis- tributed, would lend themselves to na- tional rather than regional advertis- . Ing. This sounds like the perfect corpo- rate ploy, but the British public- habit-prone, raised on notions of qual- ity-was not so easily led astray. Al- most as soon as keg bitters were intro- duced, a vigorous revolt began against them. What was this thin, fizzy, foul- smelling, vile-tasting dishwater spit- ting from the taps? In protest, some drinkers banded together and mounted what became known as the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). Their primary demand was that breweries reinstate old-fashioned bitter and forget about this other swill. When the campaign received coverage in the media, its founders learned that there were mil- lions of disgruntled customers who wanted to join them in applying pres- sure to the Big Six. The campaign started publishing an annual guide to good beers, which included a directory of the pubs that stocked them. Eventu- ally, the breweries were forced to give in, and they scrapped their plans for dominion. Most decent pubs in Lon- don now offer at least one brand of <\I\ f?lrIÞÆl i (Q) Q'[JI/ 65 cask-conditioned bitter-real ale, that is. Keg bitters are still on draught, but they are ignored by all except the dull, the unrepentant, and the perverse. T HE real ale I most often drank at the Fountain was Burton-a rich, soothing beer named in honor of the town of Burton on Trent, which has been a brewing center for hun- dreds of years. Ind Coope moved there in 1853 before acquiring the famous Allsopp Company. The Allsopps had been making ale since the Crusades. The water in Burton on Trent is special, with a high gypsum content that is ideal for pale, sparkling brews Ale produced in the Burton style is sometimes called India Pale Ale-the name is a relic of colonial days. I still remember the first glass of Burton I ever had, on that first night w hen I peeked into the public-side bar. The homey radiance of the place drew me in. I hung my coat on a knob of polished brass and took possession of a vacant stool. Right away, a bushy- haired man who'd been doing some kind of puzzle in the Standard jumped up from a chair behind the bar and asked me what I wanted to drink. This was John, the cellarman. I say "cellarman" rather than "barman" because John always made that dis- tinction when he talked about his job. He wanted people to know that he had responsibilities beyond the mere draw- ing of beer. A meticulous person of twenty-eight, John had a vaguely mil- itary attitude that manifested itself in a desire for order. Often, he wore a short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, and when he marched from tap to tap or descended into the cellar to check on the pressure of his kegs a huge bunch of keys that dangled from his belt loop rattled like the notes of a martial air. An empty glass never lingered on a table when John was around. He'd grab it up and wash it before it had the slightest chance to offend. It was John's dream that Page would some- day recommend him to Ind Coope as a potential publican, so he was dedicated and loyal, and worked hard to see that the Fountain was congenial and well run. Like Page, he was quick with a quip-annoyingly so if you happened to be nursing a sore head and preferred a dose of silence with your beer. Also he bore an uncanny physical resem- blance to his boss. For awhile after I started coming in, I assumed that he was Page's son. "Not likely, mate," he snorted when I asked him about it, but I think that secretly he was pleased